Wandering worlds, wondering words…

GW2: Astralaria, A Long Ago Short and a Use for Treasure Hunting Kits

Previously, these treasure hunting kits have been piling up in my inventory, ignored in favor of all the other things I could be doing for more reward instead.

Since finishing Astralaria on Oct 31 or so, I’ve been in a more lax period of rest and recuperation.

It was actually quite strange. I was nose to the grindstone chugging along for the week or so before, and when I made the legendary axe, the initial feeling on seeing it completed was, “Is that it?”

It just seemed more understated than envisioned in my head. For one, it’s ordinary silver when sheathed and only does its starry night glow thing when wielded.

And it just seemed like such a small item compared to all the giant hoops I had been jumping through that I felt almost letdown.

Fortunately, when I finally put it on the character I intended to use it on and with a bit of fancy cosmetic kitting out with an outfit that was just released on that very same day, the initial disappointment has been slowly moving towards long term contentment.

It looks bigger on charr, for one.

Using the haunted armor outfit with a tactically selected blue dye channel also provides a bit more particle effect glow to support it, and it lets me escape the tyranny of medium armor trenchcoats for this Ash Legion ranger/druid. Win win.

Adding to the satisfaction is the ability to envision/depict a character that only existed in my head before. This is Bastia the Bloodhound, one of the supporting characters in my long ago short “Loyalty to the Legion”.

Except a little further back in time in her younger days as Bastia Shroudmourn, gladium, after losing the rest of her warband in the story she told Flame.

That is, Flame Fireflash, the Ash Legion engineer star of the story in question, whose look has been slightly updated with the Predator rifle below.

Rakis and Brek are in the works.

Here’s a sneak peek via the character select screen, of them post incarceration and more grown up.

Rakis, being the ever-unchanging shifty-eyed sneak thief of bitter proportions; and Brek, originally a big warrior doofus following the wrong company, now haunted by voices and slightly unhinged by a madness that crept up on him while doing his time – which is just my fancy way of justifying making him a revenant to fill a hole in my charr collection.

Anyhow, the next thing that struck me was that Bastia really needed the Howler warhorn to go with Astralaria. *gulp*

On the bright side, Howler is an older legendary and much cheaper and less insanely intensive than Astralaria. On the flip side, I also want to finish legendary medium armor to finally close the book on that chapter. (It’s still SO horribly ugly though, that I would have to immediately transmute it and use it only for its function.)

Regardless of which super long term goal gets prioritized, I’m back into a period of resource accumulation downtime. I was thinking of focusing a bit more on short and medium term chievos and collections while sloowly ticking off bits of the long term stuff (aka chak gerent eggs, faction provisioner tokens and ascended material crafting every couple of days or so).

Except that chasing more achievements didn’t really seem like a break after coming down from the pursuit of a legendary, which is like a giant spreadsheet of achievement hunting.

Enter the Treasure Hunting Kits, which have been accumulating in my shared inventory and are now at 235 items, threatening to very shortly hit the max of 250 in a stack and burst.

Since I am constitutionally incapable of throwing away anything, even if doing them is way less profitable than sitting for hours in an Istan farm, I decided to attempt a few.

This time, however, I had a neat idea that completely revolutionized my perspective on these things.

I told myself, I’ll make it a solo “mini-adventure.”

The rules are, once you zone in to the nearest waypoint to the blue circle, every mob you pass, you kill; every harvesting node you pass, you harvest; every cache and sand pile and container you pass, you open; every event that pops up, you do.

Previously I was treating them like how the ordinary player treats them – trigger them, find blue circle, waypoint to blue circle, mount up and rush to the chest, take out the buried treasure, rinse and repeat. At the end of it, open a bunch of buried treasure and feel a little cheated by the loot gained.

I have decided that this is the wrong way to use them.

Treating them like mini-adventures really turns them into something like Rift’s instant adventures – a little randomized hit of content through the open world, easily completed in a couple of minutes, with a treasure chest at the end.

The profit comes not just in the final treasure chest, but in all the xp (a ton, since no one kills PoF mobs anymore), random mob drops (it’s been nearly five years since magic find was introduced, I’m at 290% base magic find by now) and harvesting nodes along the way.

Sure, it’s not Istan-levels of profitable, but it’s a nice change of pace for when running around as a farming zerg gets boring, when one is sick of dealing with other people in instanced group content, or otherwise tired of running around with laser focus on achieving a goal.

Given the peaceful feeling of re-experiencing something akin to leveling gameplay, where one just wanders across the open world keeping one’s eyes open for things happening along the way, well, it’s worth the potential loss of gold earning opportunity (which in reality wasn’t going to happen anyway, because I can only farm for one round of a meta before getting bored out of my skull and logging off to find another game.)

Suddenly, I’m in a good place in GW2 with a lot of things to do and no immediate deadline.

Minute to minute short term, I have treasure hunting kits. On a medium scale, I have a bunch of incomplete achievement tabs for Living Story 4 and PoF/HoT zones. In the long term, there are legendaries waiting in the wings.

Then other-game-wise, Fortuna just released in Warframe (yipes) while I’m -still- half-heartedly trying for Chroma Prime and now need another prime part to unlock the last rank in a Syndicate. I also suspect Path of Exile will be dropping the next bit of hype soon in mid to late November for whatever they’re planning in December once Delve league ends.